Product Description

Ascend from the role of a simple craftsman to the Doge of Venice as you form close alliances with powerful houses, conquer city markets with exquisite goods and win the hearts of Venetians with generous gestures. Avoid the path of your enemies, or hire powerful mercenaries to lend authority to your demands. Whether in Venice itself or in the competing city of Trieste – you will need all of your cunning to survive when trading and scheming! Enjoy the real-life experience of one of the most innovative games of all-time!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16352 in Video Games
• Brand: Dreamcatcher
• Model: DVD-59742-MB
• Released on: 2008-09-29
• ESRB Rating: Teen
• Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000
• Format: CD-ROM
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .31 pounds

Features

• Includes all of the professions and buildings from The Guild 2 and Pirates of the High Seas.
• Standalone gameplay. The game can be played without The Guild 2 and Pirates of the High Seas.
• New professions: mercenary and glazier plus four exciting scenarios taking place in both Venice and Trieste.
• Historically accurate depiction of Venice between 1400 and 1600.

Customer Reviews

Step down from regular Guild 2
To start with there is absolutely no improvement in the characters, voices, gameplay etc... Your in Venice but the voices are the same as if you were in Nottingham.

Also there is no story mode that I saw at all which the previous games had.

Oh and crashes. It crashes constantly after about ten minutes of gameplay. Im a big fan of The Guild 2 but this is one I wish I had skipped.

Fun game...if you have a week to sit in front of the computer...
I've played the Guild series since it was The Guild 1400. It's always had its quirks (German developers have had a bad reputation for years for putting out half-baked, buggy games and rarely supporting them). But, the games are pretty deep and they offer a great premise where you get to guide a family (not just one character) through history.

You can be just about anybody (farmer, craftsman, politician, priest) and each path gives you something interesting to do, though some are harder than others to make ends meet if you want to get somewhere politically. A big part of the game, which you don't have to play if you don't want to, is politics since you can achieve levels of office and get abilities like the ability to banish someone.

All in all, the series is great. This expansion (it's really a standalone game in the end) brings Venice into the catalog of cities/regions you can play. There's also a bit of additional game play options (you can decide if you want to marry in a church, give your beloved an engagement ring, etc.) added into the mix to sweeten the deal. The Venice environments are actually pretty compared to the original game and the Pirates expansions' Northern European environments. Two new professions which include glassmaker (a high value item producer which is good) and mercenary (which I haven't tried yet) bring even more to the mix.

All this combined with the enhancements from the previous games make the gameplay great...then there's the reason for the lower overall rating. That's because the game, though it doesn't crash for me, writes corrupted savegames. That's why I say, as long as you have days of time to play the game continuously, you're golden. If you're like the rest of the world, you'll play through the beginnings of your clan very, very often.

Worst still, JoWooD (the publisher) released a patch recently that did...nothing. Now, not everyone's reporting this problem but I think it's because the problem requires you to do something specific and seems to be tied to the politics are of the game. Even so, the forums are filled with people complaining about this issue, amongst others. And, JoWooD, true to form, is barely responding if at all.

Will they fix the issue? Hard to say...I usually write these games off if they're bugged like that (something that affects your abiilty to proceed) but I guess I want to believe that they'll figure out a solution sometime. Until they do, I would steer clear of this game for now.